


searching

by hydrospanners



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Gen, Josephine Montilyet - Freeform, and he'll write his way out, varric wrote his way into this mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-06
Updated: 2018-04-06
Packaged: 2019-04-19 01:31:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14226171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hydrospanners/pseuds/hydrospanners
Summary: Varric promised once to help the Inquisitor find her missing brother. When they reach Skyhold and he’s still missing, Niria Adaar suspects there’s something that sneaky little dwarf isn’t telling her.





	searching

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr. Written for Fictober 2017.

“So Varric.”

Niria Adaar, Herald of Andraste and Leader of the Inquisition, hobbles through his door and falls heavily on a plush chair designed for a person much smaller than her. The chair groans under the strain.

“I’ve been thinking,” she goes on with an air of studied ease, “my brother is a Qunari.”

He wants to make a joke about Solas’ herbal remedies, but there’s something to her tone that brings him up short. You don’t survive the Merchant’s Guild for as long as he has without learning to read the room.

Whatever this is, it won’t be long before someone realizes their Inquisitor isn’t where she’s supposed to be and comes looking. He hopes it’s Leliana.

“Here’s the thing about Qunari, Varric. We’re really tall. We have these horns. When we walk down a street, people notice. They whisper. They get that little thrill of fear and they tell all their friends about the cow of a woman they saw.” She hiccups, and everything starts to get a lot clearer.

“You know my brother is taller than me? Just an inch or so, but Maker did he ever gloat about it when he realized.” She hiccups again. “I don’t know why this never occurred to me before. I spent half my life–Tits. It was more than half. It was all of it. I didn’t realize it for the first four or five years, but it’s what I was doing.” She starts to laugh and it’s an empty, bitter sound that doesn’t sound at all right spilling out of Niria Adaar. Twinkle Toes.

 _Well, shit,_  he thinks, realizing where she’s going with this. He’s played enough cards that he doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t reach for the ten-ton letter in his breast pocket or rub the place where he’s sure it’s burning a hole through his tunic. He sounds perfectly casual when he asks, “What were you doing?”

Her laughter ends abruptly. She looks him in the eye, her expression too serious and focused for a drunk. But then he’s never seen her really drunk before, has he?  _Shit_.

“Hiding,” she says. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to hide the both of us in plain sight. Hiding from the Qunari, hiding from the Templars, hiding from people we owe money to. Everywhere you look there’s someone who wants to kill you or worse. Someone who wants to lock you up and scrape your mind clean until there’s no part of it left that remembers being  _you_.

“I’ve been hunted since before I was born, Varric. I learned to hide because I had to. And I went out of my fucking way to make sure Ries never had to do what I did. To make sure he got the kind of life I could never have.”

“Twinkle Toes-–”

“Don’t.” Ria throws up a bandaged palm. The linens are stained bright red. “Don’t fucking call me that. I’ve been so distracted with the Breach and demons and the Inquisition-–I never thought. I never realized. But then they locked me in that tower and I had nothing to do  _but_ think.”

“Listen–-” He starts again, but Ria jerks forward and slams her hand on his desk so hard the wood splinters.

“ _Don’t_ ,” she snarls, green light flickering beneath those bandages. “I’ve heard enough. All I want to hear now is where my brother is. He’s a fucking Qunari apostate who couldn’t hide from his own fucking reflection, Varric.  _Blackwall_ could’ve found him by now. What aren’t you telling me, you sneaky little bastard?”

His coat seems to sag under the weight of that damned letter, and Varric wonders if he hasn’t made a mistake. He wonders if Niria Adaar isn’t as much like Marian as he thought. He wonders if he’s just an old man seeing ghosts where there aren’t any.

“Dammit, Varric!” Ria leaps to her feet, her horns knocking against the chandelier over his desk. He swears he can hear her leg breaking again, but that might just be his chair.

“Ah, there you are Inquisitor.” Josephine appears in the doorway, as crisply dressed and keen-eyed at one in the morning as she was at one in the afternoon. She smiles pleasantly, like she hasn’t just walked into a raging storm. “Cullen was tearing through Skyhold like a madman trying to find you. I was beginning to worry something bad had happened.”

“It was about to,” Ria says, her eyes still focused on Varric.

He considers her, considers this naked fury. He had thought she was like Hawke. She had that same brazenly honest way about her, that same confidence, that same nonchalance. She ran toward trouble like her life depended on it. She bet high and laughed loud.

She’s so much like Hawke it hurts sometimes.

Maybe he's losing his edge in his old age, or maybe–-Maybe he just wanted her to be Hawke so much that he tricked himself into thinking she was. Maybe it made this all a little easier, a little more familiar, to let himself think it was his old friend ahead of him, cackling like a demented person as she set fire to the countryside.

Maybe he did this to himself.

“Inquisitor, you’re bleeding.” Josephine squeezes around Niria to seize her bandaged palm, paying no mind to the wisps of green light dancing around it. Varric is sure she sees it, but Josephine is a professional. More professional than him, anyway.

“Must be Tuesday,” Ria says, pulling her hand back.

Josephine frowns. “We should have someone look at this.”

“It’ll heal. And it’s the middle of the night. We don’t need to wake anyone for a little bit of blood.”

“The healers are already awake,” Josephine answers in a tone that is somehow innocent and accusatory at once. “Cullen had them roused when you went missing. We were all worried you had been hurt.”

Niria Adaar was hurt, but it wasn’t the kind of thing a healer could fix.

It might be the kind of thing Varric could fix though.

“We should let them know you are well before they wake all of Skyhold.”

Ria nods. All the rage drains out of her, leaving her slumped and pale and painfully young. They’re always so young, aren’t they?

“Goodnight, Varric.” Josephine nods politely as she loops her arm around the Inquisitor’s. Her parting look is friendly, but full of ominous promise. She really is good at her job.

“‘Night, Ruffles. Twinkle Toes.”

Ria lets Josephine lead her out without a word.

Once they’re gone, Varric unfurls a roll of fresh vellum and thinks of the Hawkes. He thinks of Marian and Carver what might've happened if they’d never had Bethany or Leandra or Malcolm. He thinks of how facing the world with no one but each other might have changed them if it had happened sooner.

He misjudged Niria Adaar. Maybe because she wanted him to; maybe because he’s a sentimental old fool who missed his friend. He tried to help, but the help he gave was for the wrong person. The Adaars didn’t need distance like Marian and Carver. What they needed-–what  _Twinkle Toes_  needed–-was to be together.

Studiously avoiding the blood-smeared, battered edge of his desk, Varric dips his pen in the inkpot and determines to fix things the only way he knows how. He writes.

 

 

 

_Ries,_

_It’s time to stop hiding, kid. Your sister needs you._

_Varric Tethras_


End file.
